ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION
Frontline 1993-1997 (Nation)
Reviewed by Holly Day

---

Have to admit, I'm a sucker for these "best of" collections - sometimes it's hard to see how great a band can be when they only have one or two songs worth listening to on each record. While Asian Dub Foundation definitely had more than one or two good songs on each record, this collection is still a definite winner, especially since most of this material never made it past the demo tape stage, and still others were confined to B-sides of singles. ADF's strengths were always in their use of cool instrumentation and samples such as traditional eastern percussion, bells, and sitar music, and these tracks are loaded with these, and more. These factors, mixed in with echoey spoken work samples about empowerment and racism, throat singing, base-line dance-beat, and electronic blips and beeps all make for some heavy music - not sure you could pigeonhole these guys into the acid, dub, trance, or house category, since they seem to flow effortlessly from one category to another.

© 2002 - Holly Day